The Moz Blog

Winning the SEO Battle at Every Step of the Purchase Path

The search engine optimization process can sometimes be mistaken for a singular, sprint-to-the-finish project, when in fact, it's more like a marathon. Searchers rarely ever convert on the first click and thus, SEO campaigns that merely target a few popular keywords and call the task finished may be fooling themselves. I made this handy chart to help illustrate the issue:

In my example, the hotel could miss out on dramatic opportunities for optimizing the path of discovery, investigation, brand research and conversion rate optimization by simply targeting "dubrovnik hotels" and ignoring the rest of the process. A comprehensive Internet marketer is going to approach this problem the same way a user approaches the process - by delivering value in every step of the chain.

I like to think of the SEO campaign process in a format like this:

Generic Research: It's very possible that, particularly for smaller brands and sites, you don't have the ability to compete for these lofy, high-level, hyper-competitive keywords. However, there's no reason you can't be listed among the references on the ever-present Wikipedia page on the subject, mentioned in a review or blog post, covered by a press publication/article or included in a directory/list of resources. If nothing else, you might consider buying ad space from the pages that rank atop the results - especially in today's market, buying CPM ads can be even cheaper than paying the engines through PPC.

Niche Research: This is often the first opportunity you'll have to rank, but only if you don't ignore the indirectly relevant (though sometimes less obvious) keywords in the discovery process. Put yourself in a customer's shoes (or, better yet, talk to lots of customers and hear how they've done this), find the achievable keywords one step above your direct acquisition channel and get to work on some great content that can earn a spot in the top 5-10 listings.

Brand Discovery: This is the classic, SEO-as-a-tactic process. Research the most relevant, highly-converting phrases, analyze the competitive landscape and find ways to build the content and earn the links necessary to rank.

Brand Investigation: The battle isn't won until the visitor converts. Make sure that when obvious queries about your product/brand/company's value arise, you're aware of the results and pro-actively influencing the content. Sometimes it's enough to simply provide excellent service and take note of the few criticisms that arise. In other cases, you may need to conduct SEO reputation management campaigns to help surface the good and push down the bad.

Brand Navigation: Although this should be the easiest query to win, it presents opportunities for further optimization. Controlling and carefullly choosing Sitelinks under your listing, watching the results in the top 5 carefully and even investing in paid search on branded terms (research has shown that combining paid + organic listings boosts the CTR & conversion rate of both - source needed if anyone in the comments can find that)

Purchase: Queries like "discount code" "coupon code" "special offers" etc. are common, particularly for anyone selling directly over the web. It's up to you to decide how and if you want to distribute these for your savvier and more cost-conscious purchasers, but in campaigns I've observed, it appears to more than make up for the "savings" with improved conversions.

Evaluation: Surfacing all of the content a visitor may be interested in about your product is wise and it can be very smart to do keyword research in the long tail around terms that follow your brand or product (so you can be sure to show up as the default resource before competitors or review sites, whose accuracy and motivation may be questionable).

I don't want to overly-complicate the SEO process, but if you're ignoring important steps in your customers' search path, you could be missing huge opportunities.

35 Comments

I go on about this frequently, especially when I used to have to defend myself every week just because we weren't showing for every conceivable generic term going that some bright spark thought we should display upon.

This is a great visual representation of the funnel a user can go down before making a decision!

"This is often the first opportunity you'll have to rank, but only if you don't ignore the indirectly relevant (though sometimes less obvious) keywords in the discovery process...."

when keyword-researching for a client the fastest keywords are naturally the most obvious... when i try to "think outside of the box" in order to find those niche keywords it's usually a very long and sisyphean process (though worth my while...)

i do it by:

searching google for a lot of different vaiables for every keyword/phrase (and see what's coming up the SERPS)

drilling down through all the content on my client's+cometitors sites (to get ideas)

a wholotta queries in google's keyword tool... (to pass the time :-) )

and last but not least - Musing and brain storming with my colleagues.

do you guys have any methods or tools you usually use to "stir it up?"

Good post, but how do you go about applying this to "insert project here" ? How do you go about figuring out what other search terms the users will search for when researching within your product or service category?

Google Insights for Search will give you a list of ideas to start with. I've uncovered some great gems with that tool. I'm an in house seo and I use our ppc data quite a bit to identify low hanging fruit. Here's what I do:

1. list top 20 or so converting ppc keywords

2. Run them individually through BOTH Google Insights for Search and the newer Search Based Keyword tool

3. Compare with my organic keyword data in Google Analytics. I immediately target the relevant suggestions from the insights tool, then keep drilling down to find high converting longtail search phrases.

Also the Google Insights tool will give you a list of search phrases gaining interest quickly.

Googles pattern spotting as a way of spotting paid links is going too far these days especially if they are just ignoring what they consider paid rather than applying different amounts of credit to different links depending on what they spot

Great post! Additional examples (maybe ecomm or lead gen) would be hlepful, as well.

IMO, the challenge for webmasters is working all of these steps into a single website. If a company gathers User Generated Content from their customers, where do you see that best fitting into this diagram?

As always, the other key here is matching up the content (even creating new content) with the right phrases. Presenting the "checkout" for a generic research, even if you are able to win SERP position, it may not be of much value if you don't meet the searchers needs. In fact, you may start to disappoint.

Many sites, especially ecommerce sites, may find themselves sitting in the middle of the path when it comes to existing content, and struggling to come up with other content. Great opportunity to take this broader keyword research and use it to help expand up or down the path, enriching the site's content to meet the needs of these additional searches.

In that process, especially if you are able to win page-1 position, even if it isn't #1, when you start to meet the needs of searchers with good relevant content throughout this process, you increase click-thru and brand recognition.... you become a known and proven entity amongst the other results, some of which may be unknown and unproven.

#5 Brand Navigation You said: "watching the results in the top 5 carefully and even investing in paid search on branded terms (research has shown that combining paid + organic listings boosts the CTR & conversion rate of both - source needed if anyone in the comments can find that)"

Does this mean if my company XYZ Manufacturing ranks #1-3 for "XYZ Manufacturing" you still recommend buying PPC for it. This would seem like a waste of money because the keyword searched seem to suggest the searcher already has chosen a brand therefore the CTR would be extremely high regardless of competition or are you suggesting if your in a highly competitive industry like hotels or lawyers and others are using your company name "XYZ Lawyer" as a PPC keyword then you should as well?

I am just thinking from a tight PPC budget perspective this would be a waste of money. I have read some data to suggest its not but the issue I have with the data is if your looking for "XYZ Lawyer" and the PPC word stands out more than organic listing to the user then you do not give the user a chance to look at the organics. While click studies show that users may look for a general keyword to the organics first if your looking for a specific company do you care if its organic or pay listing I don't think so.

I agree...if your paid listing is in the shaded "sponsored results" at the top, a lot of people don't know what the difference is and they click on the first and most relevant listing. So if you're ppc ad copy is very compelling, but your organic listing is not "as" compelling, they'll still click your paid listing.

If you have a #1 organic listing on google, I would think it wise to set your position preferences in Adwords. However, I would ONLY do this if I was getting decent conversion from the organic listing.

This post raises a great point: SEO should not be oversimplified. Marketers need to tailer each campaign to the various stages searchers go through on their purchase path. In the end it will increase page ranking and maximize qualified clicks to your site.

Great post Rand. I agree with @BenRush. I'm always harping on the keyword research and the importance of exploring keywords at each stage of the buying cycle.

I will say, however, it's not the easiest thing to sell. While we know the hotel could benefit tremendously by targeting searches at each stage in the purchasing process but getting the Hotel to buy in can be tough. I think the visual, does a not job of tying it all together for the client.

combining paid + organic listings boosts the CTR & conversion rate of both : I have seen a presentation at SES london in feb, where a case study conducted by MS and Honda, did show that. Mel Carson may be able to give better insights. You can find him on twitter.

Always skeptical of those reports especially since the last one I saw was from Google and Enquiro. Google telling us all that success was greater when organic and paid worked together....a truely shocking bit of advice from Google ;-)